In many conventional database systems, users access their data resources in one logical database, from a user's own systems. Access to a database consumes system resources, as the database system must process and respond to requests as well as accessing storage to read, write, and/or delete data. Deleting records or entries from a database has traditionally been done by identifying records for deletion and executing a request for deletion of one or more of the identified records at a time. While manual deleting may be adequate for small numbers of records to delete, there are significant disadvantages to such an approach when dealing with larger numbers of records, especially when using remote database access.
Deleting large numbers of records could be handled by making a large request to delete the large number of records all from one request. However, performing a large delete would require a significant number of resources to implement the delete operation. For example, there may be a significant burden on the database system to make available the network bandwidth, processing resources, process threads, database connections, or other resources necessary to implement the delete request.
Another approach to deleting a large number of records would be by generating many requests. However, dealing with generating numerous requests is time consuming both to generate, as well as to perform. There is also not generally a good way of knowing when would be a good time to issue requests or not, and thus the issues of resource consumption made above would stilt be a problem with generating multiple requests instead of a single large request.
Descriptions of certain details and implementations follow, including a description of the figures, which may depict some or all of the embodiments described below, as well as discussing other potential embodiments or implementations of the inventive concepts presented herein. An overview is provided below, followed by amore detailed description with reference to the drawings.